When I say ‘tenacity’, the first thing you think of is probably Mercury Treads. Maybe you thought of Irelia’s passive. Maybe you thought of Singed’s ultimate. What you probably didn’t think of was Moonflair Spellblade. What is Moonflair Spellblade, you ask? It’s just one symptom of the disease that, in my opinion, the tenacity statistic suffers from.

Symptom 1: Lack of Items





More specifically, the lack of good items. Other than the sometimes beloved Mercury Treads, there are only three other ways to purchase Tenacity on Summoner’s Rift: Cloak and Dagger, Eleisa’s Miracle, and the aforementioned Moonflair Spellblade. The fact that these three items rarely get built (or even recognized by name) is already pretty indicative of the fact that tenacity items are in serious need of help. For the sake of this article being able to back that statement up, let’s go through them briefly. I’ll try and keep things short, so we’ll just do a rough comparison to similarly priced items.

- Cloak and Dagger: At 1450 gold building out of Cloak of Agility and a Dagger, this item offers +20% attack speed, +20% crit chance, and +35 tenacity. Cloak and Dagger might give me an extra 5% attack speed and an extra 2% critical strike chance on top of the stats from the individual items, but its inability to be built into anything else is what makes it weaker than the sum of its stats. The same two items that go into the recipe offer me half of a Phantom Dancer, an item I will eventually build on my AD champ. Building C&D only serves to set me 1450 gold behind while taking up a valuable slot for future items.

- Eleisa’s Miracle: Of all the tenacity items other than Merc Treads, you probably see this one the most, if only because not much else really builds out of Philosopher’s Stone. Miracle gives you +20 Mana Regen, +25 Health Regeneration, +35 Tenacity for 1300 gold. This one’s trickier, and perhaps arguably the best after Merc Treads. The health regeneration might seem alright. After all, you’re getting 5 extra health per second, but unless you’re regenerating a ridiculously large amount, health regen is generally weaker than a straight up more HP. For starters, it’s a dead ability at full health. More importantly however, in a teamfight, more HP will always help me survive for longer; health regeneration not so much. With the extra gold from Philosopher’s Stone, I could instead buy a health crystal towards a Kindle Gem. This gets me on my way to Shurelya’s Reverie, an insane item.

- Moonflair Spellblade: At 1200 gold for 50 AP, Spellblade builds out of a Blasting Wand, and item that gives 40 AP. This means my extra 10 AP cost 340 gold. Alternatively, I could wait a bit longer and get an Amplifying Tome for about 100 gold more, giving me 60 total AP. This also gives me the option to build a Void Staff or a new-recipe Will of the Ancients. When playing AP, I’ll take Magic Penetration or Spell Vamp over 35 tenacity any day.

Symptom 2: It doesn’t stack

Tenacity from items will stack with champion abilities, however it will not stack with itself. All “secondary” stats stack: CDR, lifesteal, spellvamp, etc. This means that if I’m not Irelia or Singed, I can, at most, negate a little over a third of say, a stun, a snare, or being a fuzzy squirrel. While it’s true that mere fractions of a second can mean the difference between coming out ahead and staring at a gray screen, how many of us are able to consistently take full advantage of milliseconds shaved off of CC? (Okay, I’ll admit it first. I sure can’t.) Now, reducing the duration of CC by half? That’s definitely noticeable. So let’s look at the alternative; let’s say tenacity does stack.

Welcome to a universe where tenacity is a stat that stacks! As mentioned above, only four items in the game give tenacity. They all give the same +35 amount. This means two tenacity items will give 70 tenacity. This is actually pretty good. Or it would be if there wasn’t an item called Quicksilver Sash. For our dear readers who haven’t ever built it, QSS has an active that removes all nearly forms of CC and debuffs from you. It’s a buildable “Cleanse Plus” on a much shorter cool down. If I’m going to be 70% tenacious with two items, I could instead build QSS which will have a more practical in-game effect in most cases. With a cool down of 90 seconds, I get to use it pretty often; I get to save gold; I get to save item slots. True, I could get stunned right after I pop QSS, but son, if the enemy team is continuously chaining CC it’s bad news, tenacity or no tenacity.

Three tenacity items would make you “immune” to CC. Obviously if the items were better, this could be a huge problem (easily solved by a hard or soft cap on tenacity), however QSS would still exist, being “Cleanse Plus”. If however, I stubbornly wanted that stat in particular (as opposed to an in-game near-equivalent), Cleanse’s post-pop effect of 65 tenacity with the Summoner’s Resolve Mastery CC reduction of 1 second puts me in tenacity heaven.

Overcosted items, limited ways to buy the stat, lack of stacking, competition from things like QSS, Cleanse, or being Olaf are all leaving Tenacity weakened, if not bedridden. It still is, however, a fun stat to mess around with.

Prognosis: Grim